"Strangers, in Many Ways..."

Over-exposed, artificially ardent – this
record of visceral dissonance – visually
disconcerting, off-kilter: those blank
haunted eyes – lit by midnight –
reflexively hunting – devoid of surprise:
caught in her silently clattering scaffold
of skeleton – awkwardly pushing
against some internalized fence behind

which she'd stood terrified: how many times
had she died like this, swaying onstage
while she lip-synched her own preternatural
calm – that unearthly dark feminine
baritone sound – so polished and easy
and done to a turn: the brilliant precision
of studio-technic perfection, all earned
through repeating, repeating, repeating

until she acquired that aurally bodiless
beauty – vibrato so subtle – voice deep
and so still and so cut off from her. I cannot
today keep from viewing, reviewing
the YouTube performance of her strained
performance of her secret paradigmatic
enormously odd enigmatic performance
of soul. Seen through so many lenses,

how could she be whole? Not so different,
now, from a sense of the shattering strange
lack of “how” I’ve afflicted myself with this
week: as if any capacity I might have had
to prevail had just sprung a malevolent leak.
Karen Carpenter got to where she couldn’t
eat: hellishly branding herself as unlovely,
unlovable – fathomably incomplete.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH-xF1A9PS0

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Ambivalently Fiddled

I hadn’t played the violin
for too long, and it showed:
before I got it to my chin –
before it could be bowed –

its D string popped: unused, in place,
some moment long ago
as it lay unplayed in a case
when I’d thought to forgo

the curved wood creature it espoused
and lived to lend respect –
until it gave up, sick, unroused –
to die from my neglect.

Oh yes, I know that strings will break –
part of the everyday
experience of give and take
in instruments we play –

but something darker here obtains
in my sad fiddle, since
it’s felt the wrenching angry strains
of my ambivalence:

it sits there weeks and weeks alone
without me – left to fate –
and then when I try to atone –
it senses buried hate

which burns its red and fearful glow
into my heart and shoves
it through my arms and fingers, bow –
which tell it what it loves.



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"It and Me"

Let the body, mind nap: bundle into layered
hibernation: roll down into the enfolding
creature’s massive lap – kiss its it-ness: burrow
into a sequestered private inward view,
just outside a dream but with the drift of dream:

a scheme important, somehow, it would seem,
to psychic wealth: as if the gentle giant’s crotch
into the volupté of which you’ve driven
your frail substance seeking its rare gifts
of half-deep half-sleep held the only redolent

dark hope you had you wouldn’t botch it up:
prevent a coalescing of your shredded
winter consciousness, where – now, as if you
were a monkey in a jungle, all you know
to do for any semblance of trajectory is grab

another vine, as if it were a rhyme whose
meaning lay entirely in how it bungled towards
a kindred rhyme: as if to think consisted quite
entirely of cupping palms to catch whatever
dropped in them to drink. Your brain, by now,

is asininely nothing but an assonance in search
of assonance. Winter now consists completely
of retiring to that warm giant’s lap to sleep.
Commemorative pap to keep: incise a heart-
and-arrow in your psyche’s tree. “It and Me.”



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What You Lack

Your psyche’s tangling up
as if with fretful sentient
neural vines, inclining you
to worry over little tics
and twitches, itching
through the whole of you:

there is no hope for this,
it’s surely true, apart, perhaps,
from waiting for the view
to widen and, perhaps,
by facing sliding fears
that manifest (for instance)

in your anger at the phone:
the phone, yes, that’s
the terribly unanswered thing:
the apparatus you are used
each dawn to pressing
soft against your ear

and cheek to bring her
voice and wit and love to you:
this week your dear friend
Donna’s gone and that
feels quite incalculably
wrong, and everything

conspires in her absence
and her silence to remind you
you are quite alone.
Oh, she’ll come back: but
you’ve found out, without
her, what you lack.



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In Winter, Now

Crepuscular mid-winter’s shadow and its harrowing
noon glare – you learn to bear the season’s panoply
of lighting tricks: and how the mix transfixes –
tethered irremediably to what you would like to think
you know as “now” – now, and here, uncapturably queer
and changing, changing so immutably that changing
loses meaning: what else is there but what teems?

What’s a moment, anyway? And then to factor in its
strange exacting and immersive play with this Manhattan
sway and tilt and specificity: if you were to walk outside
with me today, you’d know that there was something
idiosyncratic, insubstantial and hilarious about this city’s
glow: the slushy heaps of January snow all seeping into,
onto, over, under feet; the passing beeps of taxis

and cell phones – the furrowed brows of babies, lovers,
athletes and the elderly: the ultimate fine distillation
of the human: irrepressible and secret through faint
rumbles of the subway from below, and plops
of melting muck that hit you in the head which drop
from overhanging eaves and cornices of New York City’s
living monuments to its unbridled dead: tenements

and row-houses unsentimentally remind you of their
ghostly cold fraternity: and you, and they, live in the city’s
stasis of eternity – in winter, now, revolving, changing,
ranging and evolving: there’s no difference at last
between the past and you: leveraging any notion
of the ultimately true to silliness: kept everlastingly at bay:
and wintry New York City lets you know this every day.



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Sexual Secret

Let’s just say
one had a young Brazilian man today
(how did one meet him? one has ways)

who took one’s breath away
and made one understand that when two gay
men really want to play

and disinhibitedly savor being one another’s prey
they get as serious
as infants.




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More About the Light

Confused, perhaps, by the ambiguous diffuse mishaps,
effects, demands of embryonic global warming,
red-breasted robins (one suspects) do not fly quite as

regularly in the winter anymore to warmer lands: and now –
well, now – a bright-red-breasted robin lights upon
a bough upon a tree outside the kitchen window:

blessed by middle-winter-white sunlight in all its middle-
afternoon oblivion and blight, the round ex-pat expectant
robin looks inordinately fat: full-up on something,

anyway: or maybe fluffed in some sharp birdy-huffy way
about the meteorologic shift in things as they affect
small feathered animals with wings. But more about

the light: each glance into the air hints at another sort
of dance inside its glisten and its glare – completely
unaware of seasonal respectability. Perhaps the robin’s

stayed for this: to be inside this whisked variety of photon
wisp and whip: to slip past the expected atoms and reject
conventional dimensions: this light is surely full of tricks,

and Birdy wants to be right in its mix – to ride its gravity-
defying rise and fall: appear and disappear into the quantum
small. (Perhaps one never saw the robin after all.)



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